You can have the world’s best-designed website with a range of high-quality products; however, if your eCommerce website isn’t driving traffic from search results, you’re missing out on a lot of sales.
On the other hand, there are several ways to promote your eCommerce website and drive sales. But no matter how impactful paid advertising methods can be, it’s not a sustainable long-term solution.
The best way to promote your eCommerce website and boost your traffic and conversion rate is through SEO.
What is SEO for eCommerce?
Ecommerce SEO is the practice of driving organic traffic to your eCommerce website by implementing strategies that increase your visibility on search engine result pages (SERPs).
Is SEO for Ecommerce Different from Other Websites?
Honestly speaking, not really. Whether you have a basic informational blog or an eCommerce store, the basic SEO technicalities remain the same for all websites.
However, there are a few additional technicalities when it comes to SEO for eCommerce websites. Don’t worry; we’ve covered all these unique aspects of eCommerce SEO in this blog post.
So, keep reading!
Do You Need to Blog for eCommerce Websites?
Short answer, yes. There are several reasons why you need to start blogging for your eCommerce website.
Your target audience is always looking for answers. By providing them with this information selflessly via blogs, you’re building trust and authority in your niche.
Blogging is also instrumental in helping people make purchasing decisions. It’s the best place for your audience to understand your products. A non-salesy blog with invaluable information is highly likely to convince them about your trustworthiness and helps build brand awareness.
Additionally, blogging will boost your organic traffic. With every keyword-optimized blog post, you’re paving a path for potential customers to find your eCommerce store.
SEO Tips for eCommerce sites that you can implement to boost organic traffic
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Website structure
Ensuring your eCommerce website is simple and easy to navigate helps Google scan and index your web pages and provides users with a better user experience.
Breadcrumbs and URL slugs | SEO tips for ecommerce sites
There are two aspects of your website structure that you need to focus on:
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Breadcrumbs
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URL slugs
Breadcrumb navigation allows your user to understand the location of their current page (like a product page) w.r.t. the website’s main pages (category pages, etc.)
It helps with site mapping and the overall structure of your website.
Second, a clean URL simply means the URL slug is readable for users. Clean URLs are intuitive and meaningful. Since they’re meant for both Google and users, they increase your website’s visibility and usability.
Here is what a messy URL looks like:
https://www.terangadigitalmarketing.com/index.php?page=blog
Here is what a clean URL looks like:
https://www.terangadigitalmarketing.com/blog
Other than these eCommerce SEO techniques, here are a few others you should take into consideration:
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Prioritize mobile experience.
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Page speed. Make sure your website’s speed is fast, for mobile and desktop. For an eCommerce website, the higher the page load time, the higher the bounce rate. You can use GTmetrix and Google’s Page speed insights to measure and improve your page load time.
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Backlinking. Work on your backlink health before your industry’s peak season to increase your traffic and SERPs rankings.
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Category Pages. Your category-level navigation is critical for eCommerce SEO.
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Sitemap. Build and submit your XML sitemap and Robots.txt file
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Internal linking. You can take advantage of internal linking to cross-sell related products to boost relevant sales.
2. In-depth Keyword strategy
Developing a keyword strategy is the foundation of every eCommerce SEO campaign.
Here are a few factors you need to consider while choosing the right keywords for your website:
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Low Competition. You don’t need a high domain authority to rank for these keywords.
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High Volume. This indicates the popularity of the keyword. The higher the search volume, the higher the potential for attracting traffic to your eCommerce website.
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High Intent. If your eCommerce website is in the dieting niche, you should target keywords that will attract users looking for the products you offer. Therefore, target product-focused topics and keywords that your target audience is actively searching for.
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Long-tail keywords. Targeting these keywords is a powerful eCommerce SEO practice. The primary focus of your keyword research should be finding long-tail keywords with low competition, high search volume, and a high potential for conversion.
There are two ways you can build a keyword strategy for your eCommerce website:
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Do your Keyword research from scratch
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Analyze your competitors
You can use tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs to conduct your keyword research.
Here are a few additional keyword SEO tips for eCommerce sites that you can implement:
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Anchor Text. Instead of using “see more” or “click here” as your anchor text, include your keywords to increase your chances of ranking for specific search terms.
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Category Pages. Treat your primary category pages (like Men’s section or Women’s section) as individual homepages. Build a keyword strategy and create dedicated content specifically for each of them.
3. Optimize your product pages
It’s essential for eCommerce websites to get their product pages right.
Strategies to optimize your eCommerce product pages:
Write compelling product descriptions. Keep it concise and scannable. You can make it SEO-friendly by incorporating your product-based keywords in your product descriptions. You can use tools like TextOptimizer to know what is the right keyword density for your webpage. Don’t just copy-paste product descriptions from your competitors; it will hurt your SEO efforts.
Split-test. To understand how well-optimized your product page is, test different formats, sizes, and content to gain insight into what works best for your audience.
Don’t complicate your product page. Users have specific expectations about what product pages should look like because of popular eCommerce websites. Ensure that your product page design is intuitive for your user. If the user can’t find the “add to cart” option where they usually do, it might affect your conversion rate.
Schema. Your product pages should have product schema and review schema. This helps drive more impressions and clicks, thereby increasing your clickthrough rate and the number of sales.
Social Media. Don’t forget to include social media integrations to entice people to share your products with their audience.
Optimize your product images. Add ALT text to all your product images. Other than contributing to your SEO efforts, it helps visually-impaired people understand your images. Additionally, compress your image to increase your page load speed.
Meta description. It’s an HTML meta tag that describes your product page’s content. Optimizing your product page meta descriptions is essential. This is because other than your page title and URL, this is the only piece of information a user can see when they find your product page on Google’s search results.
Avoid duplicate content. While creating unique content for hundreds or even thousands of product pages can be increasingly difficult, it is crucial to avoid duplicate content. To minimize the effect duplicate content can have on your SERP rankings, you can either include a canonical tag or a 301 redirect. This will help search engines understand which pages may have similar content.
4. Use HTTPS
When you ask people to trust you with their confidential data, you have to make sure that they know you’re trustworthy. HTTPS is trusted by Google and shows your customers that their data is secure.
5. Clean up broken links
Broken links, also known as dead links or link rots, are pages that can’t be found or accessed by your visitors. They usually receive an error message when they try to access them.
The most common reason for broken links on eCommerce websites is expired or discontinued products. The best solution for this scenario is to 301-redirect the URL to another product page. This will ensure that the SEO value of the expired page will be transferred to the redirected page.
Summary
Your eCommerce store’s online visibility is one of the most critical factors that determine the long-term sustainability of your eCommerce business.
Building authority and brand loyalty can be challenging if your target audience can’t find your website via search engines. This can severely affect your business.
SEO is a long-term strategy. It takes time before you can see tangible results from your SEO efforts. However, if you do it right, you will gain results for years to come.
Implement these eCommerce SEO techniques and build a strategic eCommerce SEO campaign to increase organic to your store and boost your sales.
If you think you may need some help to create an eCommerce SEO strategy that’ll bring real results for your business, you can schedule a no-strings-attached discovery call with us.
